


Nightmares

by Songswald



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-05
Updated: 2013-08-05
Packaged: 2017-12-22 13:18:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,814
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/913656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Songswald/pseuds/Songswald
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>My name is Melody Pond. I am eight years old. I am not a psychopath and I am not a killer. I will not kill the Doctor. I have escaped the Silence. My parents love me very much. I will find them. I have to find them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nightmares

**Author's Note:**

> I always kind of wondered about River's childhood and how she was raised and such so I thought I would try and write it.
> 
> Disclaimer: Some of the dialogue later in the piece is taken from the actual Doctor Who show. The characters and that dialogue is property of their respective owners. I own nothing. I mean let's be honest, I wouldn't be here writing fanfiction if I did.

All she can do is run.

Terror courses through Melody Pond as she runs from the Silence. Her footsteps echo against the silent streets and she tries to make sense of where she is. All around her are unfamiliar buildings but she doesn’t have time to orient herself. She’s going to need someplace to hide but she has no idea where she even is much less a good hiding spot. She decides she needs to stop and take a moment to think, to figure things out. So when she comes up to the next alleyway she stops. There’s a dumpster that she thinks she can fit behind although it’ll only provide superficial protection. It’s still better than standing out in the open where anyone can see her.

She manages to force herself between the cold metal and the equally cold brick wall but it’s a lot harder than she expected. Her new body is lot bigger than her last one and she hadn’t accounted for the difference.

Now that’s she’s finally stopped running, her entire being aches from the exertion. Timelords aren’t meant to do things like run several miles seconds after regenerating and she feels proof of that all through her body. She hasn’t really had time to look at it properly yet but she knows that it’s bigger and older than her last. It seems that she’s regenerated into an adult or a teenager at very least. It feels strange, being a so young in a body so old.

_Okay, okay I need a plan. I need to find someplace to sleep for the night, someplace they won’t find me._

But she has no place to go. No place she could even possibly go. So much mental planning to escape and somehow she failed to account for what she would do afterwards. She starts psyching herself out.

_Where can I go? I don’t know anyone here. What am I supposed to eat? How am I supposed to survive?_

She finds herself hyperventilating and grounds herself by telling herself what she knows is true.

_My name is Melody Pond. I am eight years old. I am not a psychopath and I am not a killer. I will not kill the Doctor. I have escaped the Silence. My parents love me very much. I will find them. I have to find them._

It is just as she’s thinking the last words that they descend on her. She had assumed that with a new face and a head start she could escape them.

She was wrong.

XXXXXXX

They push her head under water again. She wasn’t ready for it this time though and ends up inhaling some of the liquid. She starts coughing, choking trying to get air into her lungs but she only ends up taking in more water. Her throat and chest burn as her respiratory system makes her breath in involuntarily again.

And finally after what seems like forever they pull her head out of the water, yanking on her new hair.

“Melody honey,” a too sweet voice whispers in her ear, “just say that you won’t try to escape again and it’ll all end. All of it.”

She starts crying. _My name is Melody Pond. I am eight years old. I am not a psychopath and I am not a killer. I will not kill the Doctor. The silence has found me but I will escape. My parents love me very much. I will find them._

“Melody,” the woman’s voice says again, “we’re doing this because we love you. We care about you. We want to see you live to carry out your divine purpose of killing the Doctor. You will be the woman who saves the universe and everyone will know who you are. But you’ve been very selfish by running away. Struggling against this is pointless and you need to be punished.”

She’s engulfed in the water again. She’s not sure exactly how many people are there besides Madame Kovarian. No one else has spoken but she assumes there must be at least one other person in the room guarding the door.

She thinks about this place, how she’s so trapped like a canary in a coalmine and she fills up with hate. Hate for the Silence and for their compound and for Madame Kovarian and for her damned purpose. Hate for them deciding things about her life before she as a person was ever really properly formed. Because she doesn’t want to kill the Doctor. She wants to find her parents and have them love her like they were supposed to so she could grow up in a home filled with warmth instead of here where there’s nothing but secrecy and death and a coldness that pierces the skin and permeates the bones.

Her head is pulled from the water again. Strangely, it occurs to her that she still hasn’t properly seen her new face and she takes a quick peek at the woman staring at her in the reflecting of the bucket of water. She appears to be Asian. She can’t get a good enough look to tell anything more specific but the long black hair and delicate bone structure is a dead giveaway. She hears Madame Kovarian talking but she finds herself incapable of listening anymore. She thinks about how odd it is that she finds herself in this new body instead. Gallifreyans matured mentally much faster than humans but physically they were about on par. Although much until humans, when one happened to regenerate as a toddler they only grow until they reach biological adulthood when they stop. Or at least that’s what they’ve taught her here. They said it was important for her to get a feel for her people so she would realize all she lost when the Doctor killed them all.

 Before she knows it, her head is pushed back into the bucket. She doesn’t know how much longer she can take it. They’ve been going at it for at least 25 minutes by her count and she’s starting to feel a little faint. She’s never passed out before _. What a peculiar sensation_.

Her vision starts to go black and she passes out, the words _we’re doing this because we love you_ echoing in her head.

XXXXXXX

She shoots him. His body crumples to the floor and Melody takes a step back, shocked at what she did. Vaguely she hears the clatter of the gun falling to the floor but she’s too wrapped up in the war in her mind to focus much on it. She shot him. A living breathing person and now he’s going to turn cold and never breathe again because _she shot him._ What had she been thinking? She replays the last few minutes in her head, reanalyzing her actions.

_He walked into the room. I was picking my nails with one of the knives in the training room because honestly who shows up to their first day of teaching private lessons an hour late? He handed me the gun and told me to shoot one of the targets. He had probably been told about me. I’m a hell of a shot but I’d refused to kill anything living and I know that it had been gossip among the solders in the compound. I shot the targets with ease, getting a bullseye every time but once. He’d then brought out a cage containing two rabbits and told me to shoot one. I refused. He started yelling. He struck me. I fell to the ground. He kicked me and told me to get up and do it. I wouldn’t and he kept yelling, his face growing red with rage and frustration. He started to attack me and I-_

But she can’t remember anything after that. It was all too blurry and if she was being honest with herself, she really doesn’t want to remember it. She holds her head in her hands in sobs. Oh god what are they going to do to her when they find out she _murdered_ her new instructor?

So three hours later, that’s how she’s found, lying curled up staring blankly at the wall with red eyes and a runny nose with a man just a few feet away lying in a pool of his own blood. She is picked up and countless people ask her what happened despite the fact that they all know what happened. There’s only one thing that could have happened.

Later various people congratulate her on her first kill. She nods and stays silent during those particular exchanges and eventually it all dies down. To her surprise, she isn’t punished, isn’t reprimanded. No one even speaks of any sort of retribution.

But she still thinks about that man despite her best attempts not to. Yes, he was probably a terrible person who hired himself out to teach people how to kill, but he could have had a family. Somewhere out there a mother mourns the loss of a child that she doesn’t know what happened to and a wife and children await someone who isn’t coming home. All because of her.

And when she considers all this, she panics. She wants to cry and scream and just hate herself for what she did. So she repeats those words to herself. _My name is Melody Pond. I am fifteen years old. I am not a psychopath and I am not a killer. I will not kill the Doctor. My parents love me very much. I will find them. I will escape._

But somehow, they don’t ring true like they once did.

XXXXXXX

She has regenerated into a toddler again. And it’s _infuriating_. She had finally grown into her last body and then bam. Regeneration. It happened during training outside in an abandoned parking lot when her teacher threw a badly placed knife that nicked her jugular. It was enough though and Melody regenerated into an African American toddler. Fearing what the Silence would do if they found out, her trainer had fled and left Melody alone in the middle of New York. It had been hell finding her way home.

 It’s very rare that her species regenerates into anything other than full grown adults as it’s biologically beneficial but somehow she ends up the one of the unlucky few. However, it presents a golden opportunity. Because it’s the same year that her parents started kindergarten and as it happens, she looks to be the right age to enroll. And where her parents are, the Doctor will be. The Silence isn’t sure exactly when they first make contact with the Doctor, but they know it happens. And if she can stick with them long enough, she can make find the Doctor to kill him.

So she dons bows in her hair and a cute dress appropriate for a toddler and allows one of the soldiers in the Silence to pretend to be her mother. The woman’s name is Miranda and she’s actually a year younger than Melody herself. Miranda is a nice woman, but she’s and Melody don’t particularly bond despite the fact that they’ll most likely have to spend a good portion of time together from now on in order to maintain the ruse. She supposes it’s because they’re both so closed off.

So in the morning of her first day they sit together in silence while Miranda drives her to school. Although Melody would never admit it, she’s nervous. All these years of training boil down to this last mission. This is how she’s going to find the Doctor and she cannot screw it up. The universe depends on her pulling this off.

Miranda parks the car and they walk into the school together. They hold hands like all the other parents are doing with their children and if Melody weren’t so preoccupied with potentially screwing this mission up she might have been embarrassed.

Once they’re at Melody’s classroom for the next year they part and Melody walks in. The day starts with an introduction and she spots her parents, Amelia Pond and Rory Williams. Resentment bubbles up in her but she manages to push it down to maintain her look of innocence.

Within a few minutes it occurs to her that despite the fact that she already received a very thorough education from the Silence, it’s going to be nothing like going to public school. Where before she was taught proper form for slicing open someone’s neck, here she’ll be taught about science and history and such and she’s suddenly finds herself very unprepared for all of it. It’s the normal life she used to want but now that it’s here, resting precariously on her real life, she can’t help but be a bit panicky. She takes a deep breath.

_My name is Melody Pond. I am twenty-six years old. I am a psychopath and I am a killer, born with the purpose of saving the universe. I will kill the Doctor for the common good. My parents abandoned me right after I was born and I am better of having been raised away from them. I will succeed in my mission._

It is now time for them to do a friendship activity to get to know their new classmates. She holds her head high and immediately walks over to where her mother is standing alone, looking around at the other children talking happily. “My name’s Melody.”

“Amelia,” her mother says. She is surprised when she hears a thick Scottish accent. She had assumed since her mother had grown up in England she’d have an English accent. There’s so much she didn’t know about her.

XXXXXXX

She wants to scream in frustration. She’d finally found him. She’d prepared so long for this moment and he was making it so difficult by thwarting her every move to kill him. She pulls a gun, he had emptied the out all the bullets. She tried the other, he’d switched it. She pulls out the letter opener and he bats it away with his sonic screwdriver. The Silence had warned her about the sonic screwdriver.

“If you were in a hurry you could have killed me in the cornfield,” the infamous Doctor says. Now that she’s met him, she’s not quite sure what to make of him. After all the things she heard she hadn’t expected him to be… this.

“We’d only just met. I’m a psychopath,” she says, turning around to go for the other gun, “I’m not rude.”

She points it and hears the click that means the gun’s magazine had been taken out. Amy screams in the background. The Doctor blows on the magazine that he’d clearly removed earlier and Melody’s annoyance grows with the smug look on his face.

Amy steps forward and addresses Melody, “You are not a psychopath.” She turns to the Doctor, “Why would she be a psychopath?”

“Oh mummy, mummy pay attention. I was trained and conditioned for one purpose,” she says and she and the Doctor start circling around each other, “I was born to kill the Doctor.”

“Demon’s Run, remember? This is what they were building.” They’re standing face to face now, both of them invading the other’s personal space and neither of them about to back down. “My bespoke psychopath.”

He says it with what she almost thinks is… love? No, that can’t be right. The Doctor is a monster. He does not love. She almost falters for a second but reminds herself.

_My name is Melody Pond. I am fifty years old. I am a psychopath and I am a killer, born with the purpose of saving the universe. I will kill the Doctor for the common good. The Doctor is a monster and he has tricked my parents, my best friends, into believing he is someone good when the truth is far more insidious. It is imperative that he is killed. I will succeed in my mission._

She steels her nerves. “I’m all yours sweetie.” She leans forward and does it. A simply kiss. And the deed has been done.

It’s in those brief seconds that she thinks the Doctor and her are made for each other. Both of them monsters and both of them seeking redemption in the only way they know how.

“Only River Song gets to call me that.”

“And who’s River Song?”

“An old friend of mine.”

“Stupid name.” And it really is. Who would name their child River Song?

She steps away, walking over to the window where she’s decided to make her exit. Not that she really needs one. The Doctor will be dead and it’s not as if Amy and Rory are going to decide to suddenly come after her.

She stands at the edge of the window. “Look at that. Berlin on the eve of war. A whole world about to tear itself apart.” Melody smiles. “Now that’s my kind of town. Mum, dad, don’t follow me and yes that is a warning.”

“No warning for me then?” He must think he’s funny. Shame he had to die. They would make a good couple.

“No need my love. The deed is done. And so are you.”

The Doctor starts to collapse and Amy and Rory flock to his side.

“What’ve you done? River-”

“Oh River, River, River, more than a friend I think.”

“What’ve you done?!”

“It was never going to be a gun for you, Doctor, the man of peace who understands every type of warfare except perhaps the cruelest. Kiss, kiss.” And then she jumps. Jumps right off the ledge and out of a world contaminated by the Doctor. He has taken up half a decade of her life but no more. She is free.

XXXXXXX

It took three times for her to really properly wake up.

The first time she was alone with a nurse who told her to lie back down. She suspected that she had given her more drugs because she passed out after a few more minutes.

The second time she woke up to Amy and Rory standing over her. She briefly said some things she didn’t really remember and blacked out yet again.

The third and final time she woke up to a pounding head and blurry vision. She knew immediately that it was going to stick this time. Everything that happened rushed back to her. Killing the Doctor. Saving him. _God that was stupid what the hell was I thinking?_ Because she definitely felt the loss of all her regenerations now. She just remembers seeing him lying before her, dying and so pitiful. And then she found out that she was this person that he would trust so much someday and she made a decision. Long ago she wanted a family. She wanted a nice normal life with people who loved her. She’d given up on that dream long ago but some of it must have stayed with her because when she saw the opportunity to live it she took it. She had a choice. A choice between fulfilling her purpose, killing the Doctor, and having her parents hate her or saving him, being forgiven, and living a life she’s always wanted with people she’d always wanted there. And she’d chosen the latter.

But she still isn’t too sure about her fairytale ending. She will go to prison for killing the Doctor despite the fact that in the end she chose to save him. Sooner or later the Silence will find out that she didn’t actually kill him. They will find her, and she will be punished. She feels her life spinning out of control. Her hands grip the sheets and she remembers.

_My name is River Song. I am fifty  years old. I have killed but I am not a psychopath. I am in control of my own life and will not yield to some so called purpose. I don’t know who the Doctor is, not really, but someday he will be someone who I trust and perhaps even love a great deal. My parents love me and I will find them again as soon as I am well enough to do so. I have the promise of a happy ending. And for now that is enough._

XXXXXXX

River opens her eyes and feels dreams of half forgotten memories rushing back to her and they hit her like a freight train. All these memories and the associated emotions blindside her. Things that she had repressed are suddenly bubbling to the surface of her memory. And not just all the memories from the dream but other things, things that she hadn’t thought about in a long time. That time when Madame Kovarian was teaching her to pick locks and every time she messed something up she would be burned with a match. That instance when they locked her in a white room with no food, water, or anything to do for three straight days as part of her mental conditioning. And one part she’s starting to remember particularly vividly when she was training with yet another new instructor, a foul man around the age of 60 who stood behind her, his breath hot on her ear as he whispered crude things interspersed with the phrase “don’t worry it’ll be alright” and his hand slowly inching up her thigh, under her shorts and-

She’s going to be sick. She throws back the covers and runs into the bathroom, desperately clutching her stomach. She heaves until there’s nothing left in her stomach and then she’s left there, kneeling on the floor and shaking as makes an attempt at pulling herself together.

It takes her a few seconds before she realizes that she hadn’t put her hair up the night before and that someone has been holding it back for her. She turns around and see’s the Doctor _, her Doctor_ , standing behind her with a concerned expression. He offers her a towel and some mouthwash. She gratefully accepts. While she washes out her mouth, she grounds herself.

_My name is River Song. I am three hundred seventy-seven years old. I have killed but I am not a psychopath. The Doctor and I are in love. We are married. My parents love me and I love them too. I have my fairytale ending. I am safe._

So after she’s done washing herself up, she lets the Doctor coax her back into their bed in their bedroom on the Tardis. She lets him fold her into an embrace and rub her shoulder and mutter soothing words about how he has her, how she’s not in any danger. She lets him tuck her back in and they lie there, wrapped up in each other.

And although after all this time she doesn’t have nightmares very often, she knows that when she does he’ll be there to chase them away.


End file.
